Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR)

The Highly Capable, Truly Scalable Radar

The Air and Missile Defense Radar – AN/SPY-6(V) – is the Navy's next generation integrated air and missile defense radar. It is advancing through development and on track for the DDG-51 Flight III destroyer.

The radar significantly enhances the ships’ ability to detect air and surface targets as well as the ever-proliferating ballistic missile threats.

Meet the Navy's Air and Missile Defense Radar

AMDR provides greater detection ranges, increased discrimination accuracy, higher reliability and sustainability, and lower total ownership cost as well as a host of other advantages when compared to the current AN/SPY-1D(V) radar onboard today’s destroyers.

The system is built with individual ‘building blocks’ called Radar Modular Assemblies. Each RMA is a self-contained radar in a 2’x2’x2’ box. These individual radar RMAs can stack together to form any size array to fit the mission requirements of any ship, making AMDR the Navy’s first truly scalable radar.

The inherent scalability could allow for new instantiations, such as back-fit on existing DDG 51 destroyers and installation on aircraft carriers, amphibious warfare ships, frigates, Littoral Combat Ship and DDG 1000 classes, without significant new radar development costs.

For the DDG 51 Flight III destroyer, the SPY-6(V) AMDR will feature:

37 RMAs – which is equivalent to SPY-1D(V) +15 dBMeaning, SPY-6 can see a target of half the size at twice the distance of today’s radar

Over 30 times more sensitive than AN/SPY-1D(V) in the Flight III configuration

Designed to counter large and complex raids

Adaptive digital beamforming and radar signal/data processing functionality provides exceptional capability in adverse conditions, such as high-clutter and jamming environments. It is also reprogrammable to adapt to new missions or emerging threats.

All cooling, power, command logic and software are scalable

Launch Infographic

Reliability and Affordability

Designed for high availability and reliability, AMDR provides exceptional capability and performance compared to SPY-1 – and at a comparable price and significantly lower total ownership cost.

AMDR’s performance and reliability are a direct result of more than 10 years of investment in core technologies, leveraging development, testing and production of high-powered Gallium Nitride (GaN) semiconductors, distributed receiver exciters, and adaptive digital beamforming. AMDR’s GaN components cost 34% less than Gallium Arsenide alternatives, deliver higher power density and efficiency, and have demonstrated meantime between failures at an impressive 100 million hours.

AMDR has a fully programmable, back-end radar controller built out of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) x86 processors. This programmability allows the system to adapt to emerging threats. The commercial nature of the x86 processors simplifies obsolescence replacement – as opposed to costly technical refresh/upgrades and associated downtime – savings that lower radar sustainment costs over each ship’s service life.

AMDR has an extremely high predicted operational availability due to the reliable GaN transmit/receive modules, the low mean-time-to-repair rate, and a very low number of Line Replaceable Units. Designed for maintainability, standard LRU replacement in the RMA can be accomplished in under six minutes – requiring only two tools.

This new S-band radar will be coupled with:

X-band radar – a horizon-search radar based on existing technology

The Radar Suite Controller (RSC) – a new component to manage radar resources and integrate with the ship’s combat management system

Scalable. Capable. Reliable. Affordable.

The Air and Missile Defense Radar is expected to meet the Navy’s current and future mission requirements – and will be ready to protect against the threats of today and tomorrow.